Stories from the dark side of society

Wednesday

Apr 16, 2014 at 5:53 PMApr 18, 2014 at 10:24 AM

By Rae Padilla Francoeur

"High Crime Area: Tales of Darkness and Dread" by Joyce Carol Oates. The Mysterious Press — an imprint of Grove/Atlantic Inc., New York. 2014. $23.The new collection of short stories by Joyce Carol Oates — "High Crime Area: Tales of Darkness and Dread" — takes place in our city’s neighborhoods, within our strained families and in our own minds. The "darkness and dread" Oates evokes is familiar to us all.The painful, edgy title story, "High Crime Area," is about fear and trust. A 26-year-old teacher at an inner city college in Detroit wants to do well by her students though she suspects they mock everything about her including the color of her skin. She wants to be liked but she realizes that her students, barely literate and yet striving for degrees, detect the insincerity of her moderated praise. She carries a small, unregistered handgun in the bottom of her purse. It’s nearly inaccessible. She’s never fired it. And its presence is a torture and a torment. Oates creates a remarkable scene between Mz Mc’tyre, as her students call her, and a young black man who she thinks is following her to the parking garage several blocks from the campus. The young teacher’s paranoia explodes into palpable fear and panic that grows as the pair near the garage."High" is a deeply sad, obviously heartfelt evocation of the loss of a husband late in life. Agnes and her husband were both respected professors at an Ivy League university when he abandoned her in his unexpected death. "I need to save myself," she says afterward. She is utterly bereft, an experience Oates describes in her memoir "A Widow’s Story" about her life after her own husband’s death. Smoking pot, getting high, is her coping mechanism because, while high, she feels elated, expansive — better. As the realization that the man sworn to protect her and insulate her is gone, her struggle for a foothold intensifies. She battles her sense of invisibility by seeking a former student she taught at a prison literacy program. Mattia had blossomed as a writer and he attributed his growing competency to Agnes. She embarks on a quest to reconnect after his release from prison.It’s not unusual for older, esteemed male authors to disparage women and their competencies. Oates makes hay with just such a scenario in "Last Man of Letters." An erudite author, poet and essayist is completing the last leg of a European tour when he is portrayed lacerating every female helpmate assigned to his tour. His undignified demise can be viewed as the fitting end to a fathead or an erotic fantasy, quite delightful, gone awry. Either way, the story is aggravating for its subject matter but lots of fun."Toad-Baby" is short but powerful. A mother gives birth to an unwanted child of mixed race. The child is cranky and clearly not physically healthy. His 13-year-old sister, who runs away from home, realizes that she is now responsible for the very life of this child because their mother is drunk and depressed. "Why is this my life?" the mother asks. The young girl, severely sleep deprived, must watch the mother every second in order to protect the infant from her drunken abuse.There’s a longer story at the heart of the book titled "The Rescuer" about an estranged brother and a sister, both talented scholars, who wind up in a dangerous neighborhood struggling to survive and reconnect in the face of physical violence and addiction. Another story, "The Home at Craigmillnar," is narrated by an orderly at a nursing home in Wisconsin who was once a medical worker in Iraq. He enters Sister Mary Alphonsus’s room early one morning and realizes that something is "not-right." The sister is dead and has a strange swath of netting wrapped around her head. He knows whereof he speaks, it turns out, in noting the odd circumstances. The deeper he gets into his story, the more it changes.Oates has presented us with stories of mystery and dread, haunted not by ghosts but by the vulnerabilities of a complex society where drugs, race, and religious sway over the needy and disenfranchised create fear, paranoia and life-threatening circumstances.Rae Padilla Francoeur’s memoir, "Free Fall: A Late-in-Life Love Affair," is available online or in some bookstores. Write her at rae.francoeur@verizon.net. Or read her blog at http://www.freefallrae.blogspot.com/ or follow her @RaeAF.